Friday, June 13, 2008

I met up with Ron for dinner tonight. His field camp has just finished their work in the Durango area. I grilled him for information on the spots where they map - I wanted to know why I see so many vans pulled over beside the same big roadcut every spring. (I have never taken my mapping classes to either of the classic Durango field areas, by the way. I have my own favorites, chosen for 1) nice views, 2) variety of rock types, and 3) interesting map geometries - one of them is perfect for getting students to think about features that dip upstream vs downstream.)

During the conversation, I wondered which towns were visited by the largest number of field camps. Some possibilities that I could think of:

I know there are some early field camps that work in Arizona, and there have got to be some classic places in Utah that get a lot of traffic. (Lots of field camps drive through Moab, in part because there aren't many good places to cross the Colorado River, but do many groups stay near there?)

6 comments:

Being a community college, with only a smattering of majors and a number of teachers, we keep moving for the whole two weeks we are on the road, with stops in Durango and Moab, and lots of parks. The base camp for University of Nevada, Reno is in Ruth NV, near Ely.

Our field camp moved the entire time as well, traveling much of Wyoming. One of the places in WY that seems to be pretty popular is Wind River Canyon, near Thermopolis, due to the nonconformity that is exposed. It is the southern-most route through the Wind River Mountains, however, and tends to have a lot of truck traffic.

I noticed that my former field camp school, University of Arizona, still occasionally starts in Flagstaff, AZ. They also go to different places each year, not always in Arizona, including Wheeler Peak, NV. The year I went, we started in Flagstaff and ended up in the Chiricahua Mountains.

Hanging on by my nails...

About Me

I'm a forty-something tenured geology professor at a small public college in the Rockies. I love mountains - hiking in them, looking at them, studying them.
You can reach me at shearsensibility at gmail dot com.
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